Blessing in Disguise

by Lauraine Snelling

  Kane stopped in the act of setting the collar on the off horse to watch the wonder on her face. Her high cheekbones were pink from the early-morning chill, and her hair rippled liquid gold down over her shoulders as she paused in her brushing to stare at the sky. When she looked toward him, he could have sworn bits of summer sky came down and smiled from her eyes.

  His breath caught in his throat. He started to say something but smiled instead to give his heart time to flutter back to where it belonged. When he could speak, he hooked the last trace and motioned toward the seat. “We’d best be on the road. Home is still a long way off.” He watched as she deftly worked her hair into a bun at the back of her neck. What a beauty she is. Thank you, Father.

  Language lessons continued sporadically as the trotting horses ate up the miles up and down rolling hills and past flat valleys where sod houses told of other settlers. Herds of cattle could be seen once in a while and farmers either finishing harvest or plowing fields.

  One thing Augusta realized early on was that the farms were few and far between. Shouldn’t they be getting close to Blessing sometime soon? Every time they crested a hill, she hoped to see the town ahead or the flat land she read about in the letters back home. And each time she kept in a sigh of disappointment.

  Kane watched her, wondering at the sadness he sensed more than once. Was she not happy with the land they were crossing? If not, the ranch wouldn’t appeal to her either. His land looked much like this.

  Black clouds piled on the horizon again, and the wind kicked up, bringing with it a chill that seemed even colder after the heat of the day. Dusk fell early as the clouds drew nearer and lower. Kane reached behind the seat and pulled up the elk hides he had rolled and set there. He handed one to Augusta and motioned for her to put it over her head while he did the same with the other.

  The rain hit with drops the size of the hail the day before and almost as cold. Knowing they had only about five miles to go, Kane kept the team at a trot, all the while fighting with his other hand to keep the hide from blowing away. Rain poured down the hair side and soaked every bit of them not covered by the hides. Mud splashed up from the horses’ hooves and splattered the hem of her skirt and his pants.

  But when he motioned for Augusta to climb over the seat back and huddle down in the wagon bed, she shook her head and clamped the hide covering more tightly.

  If the horses hadn’t known where to turn off, he might have missed the track to the ranch in the rainy dark. The dog barking brought Morning Dove to the door, and the golden opening looked good as heaven’s gates to the weary and drenched travelers. Together Morning Dove and Lone Pine helped Augusta from the wagon seat and into the house.

  Augusta’s teeth were chattering so hard, she couldn’t talk, and the shaking consumed the remainder of her body as well. It wasn’t until she saw their faces by the lamplight that she realized they must be of another race. Perhaps these were the Indians she’d heard so much about. But it didn’t matter. All she cared about was the heat that emanated from the fire in a stone fireplace big enough to roast an ox whole.

  Kane and the two were talking together, but since she didn’t understand a word they said, she just turned to face the fire, warming her hands and face. If only she had dry clothes to change into. Even a blanket to put around her while her clothing dried. She heard the other woman leave the room, and Kane came to stand beside her.

  He nodded to the man with mahogany skin and black hair that was braided much like she did hers at night. “Lone Pine.” Kane bobbed his head just a mite, so Augusta repeated the name. When the woman returned, he nodded at her and said, “Morning Dove.”

  Morning Dove brought blankets with her and a garment over one arm. “You men, go now.” She waved for them to leave, and when they did, she turned with a smile to Augusta. Motioning for her to take off her wet things, she held out a blanket to warm by the fire and then wrapped it around the still-shivering woman when she had stripped to her underthings. “Now take off rest.”

  Augusta shook her head when she realized the meaning of the gestures and clamped the blanket more tightly around her.

  “Nei, I will be fine.”

  But Morning Dove ignored the pleading and gestured again. “You take them off.” Her words carried a warning that made Augusta fear the woman would follow through if she didn’t do as asked. While Morning Dove held the blanket, Augusta stripped to her skin, letting her wet garments pool at her feet.

  The Indian woman guided her to a hide-covered chair she had pulled nearer the fire and gently pushed her into it, then she proceeded to remove Augusta’s boots and stockings. Her dark eyes radiated nothing but friendship, and by this time Augusta was too tired to care.

  She ate the food they put before her, each bite taking an act of will, for she only wanted to go to sleep. Even the steaming coffee did nothing more than lull her into the twilight of near sleep. When Morning Dove took her to the bedroom and handed her the nightgown she’d found in the carpetbag and dried at the fire, Augusta murmured a thank-you and, after slipping it over her head, crawled beneath the covers of the bed.

  Thank you, Father . . . was all she managed before falling into the depths of sleep.

  Sometime in the night she almost surfaced enough to feel heat coming from near her. She turned to the source and slipped back under the waves of rest.

  A rooster crowed and another answered.

  Augusta smiled at the comforting sound and stretched as she yawned herself awake. Her hand thumped into a decidedly warm and solid body beside her. She looked to her right, directly into warm golden eyes.

  With a shriek Augusta flung herself from the bed and stared at the smiling man in openmouthed horror. “What do you think you are doing in my bed?”

  Chapter 9

  Blessing

  September 2

  Augusta was not on the next morning’s train. Nor the next.

  “You don’t really mean for me to go try and find her?” Hjelmer stared at his mother, not doubting for a moment that was what she really meant.

  Bridget shook her head, a wisp of snowy hair waving on one side of her heat-reddened face.

  He breathed a sigh of relief.

  “No, you will not just try. You will find her!” Bridget clapped her hands on her roundly padded hips and glared at her recalcitrant son. “She is the only sister you have left, after all, and she might be in terrible trouble. How would you know?”

  She had him there. Never would he share with her some of the horror stories he’d heard of lost immigrants, women especially. “But, Mor . . .”

  “No ‘but, Mor.’ ” She even imitated his voice. “Which train will you be leaving on?”

  “Look.” Hjelmer held out his hands palms up in a peace offering.

  “I never said I wouldn’t go, but it seems foolish to me to run off on a wild-goose chase when she could be coming tomorrow.”

  “Then why hasn’t she sent a telegram?” Bridget had visited the sad man behind the green eyeshade, Gunnar Erickson, at the sack house both morning and afternoon since her daughter failed to arrive.

  “Maybe she has run out of money.” He recognized his mistake before the words finished passing his lips.

  “Oh, well, that makes your staying here in your comfortable home all right, doesn’t it? What if she is starving to death?”

  Wisely he refrained from answering that question. “All right.” He raised his hands in the air and let them fall in surrender. “I will wait today, and if she doesn’t come, then I will go to St. Paul tomorrow to see if there is any knowledge of her there. Since the trunk got here, that means it was transferred to the St. Paul and Pacific. Going to Chicago didn’t bear thinking of. How in the world was he supposed to find her anyway? While the flood of Norwegians to the new land had slowed the last year or two, still, one young woman—or rather not so young, he thought a bit spitefully—who didn’t speak a word of English and had foolishly started out on her own rather than waiting for a group, well
. . . It certainly wasn’t going to be easy to find her.

  Leave it to Augusta! He conveniently forgot the many times she had bailed him out of trouble in his growing-up years and only remembered her tendency to order her baby brother and the others around. Augusta had always thought she knew best.

  Bridget stared down at hands clenched in her apron. “Mange takk, and go with God.”

  It might just take one of God’s miracles to find my sister . Hjelmer shook his head. “I’ll try to stop in to see you in the morning before I leave. Better get back on over home and get things caught up before I go.” He thought of the stack of letters he needed to answer and the area people he needed to talk with to determine how people wanted him to vote on upcoming issues of the Congress. He should have already been back in Bismarck, but between the bank, the smithy, and his machinery sales, he had more than enough to occupy three men, and now he had to head east on what he hoped was not, but feared was, a wild-goose chase.

  Should he contact the police in Grand Forks and St. Paul? How did one go about searching for a missing relative? Or a missing anyone for that matter. Hjelmer left the boardinghouse and strode up the newly installed boardwalk, walked past the general store, and turned in at the shed he’d built to house the smithy and what machinery he had in stock. With harvest about done and fall fieldwork starting, he had purchased several plows, discs, and harrows. If anyone wanted something else, he could order it for them.

  “What’s up, boss man?” Sam looked up from the piece of steel he was working in the forge.

  Hjelmer rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Boss man, eh? I wish.”

  “You goin’ then, huh?”

  “You ever tried arguing with my mother?”

  Sam shook his grizzled head. “No, an’ ah don’t plan to. She a woman with a mind of her own, but she got a heart big as this plain round about heah.” His soft voice still bore traces of his southern upbringing. “Somewhere ah heah tell that Norwegians be a hardheaded folk.” The twinkle in his dark eyes brought a smile to Hjelmer’s face. “But then you don’ likely know ’bout that.

  Hjelmer shook his head again and hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “Other than my mother and missing sister, how have things been going?”

  “Ah keeps busy.”

  “I know that. I take it Eulah left with Haakan and Lars’ threshing crew?”

  “Yes, suh. She and Lily Mae took the little ones along too, and they’s driving the cook wagon all over the countryside. Miz Bjorklund say they won’t be home for a month or so, depending on the harvest.”

  “If it isn’t any better than here, it’ll be less than a month.”

  “Ah figured that. Us coming to Blessing be a right good thing.” Sam gave the bellows a pump to keep his fire hot. “You got time to help rim a couple wheels this afternoon? Lemuel’s goin’ to help get the fire goin’. We chopped wood half the night. Keepin’ wood to heat the rim is the hardest part.”

  “I know. Your idea to keep a couple of extra wheels handy has paid off well.”

  Sam ducked his head at the compliment, then flashed a smile at the man beside him. “You ready to put off your go-to-meeting clothes and come do some real work?”

  Hjelmer laughed and clapped his friend on the shoulder. “Let me go talk with Anner, and then I’ll be back. Let’s get those wheels fit as soon as possible. I saw a few more wobbly ones on wagons in line over at the sack house.” A good part of the blacksmith business was shrinking the metal rims to fit on the wooden wheels of the area wagons, and while some farmers looked ahead and got this done before harvest, others didn’t. Heating the rims and putting them back on the wheels, then shrinking them was a two-man job, along with a boy to keep the fires burning hot enough.

  “Sorry I haven’t been here much.”

  “Got to get that constitution done too.” Sam pushed the metal bar back in the white-hot coals. “I been reading the paper ’bout all the arguin’ goin’ on. Give me a hot fire and iron to work any day. Guess I’ll be helpin’ milk cows for t’other Miz Bjorklund too.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the fighting that goes on. Bunch a crooks, those railroad people. If they had their way, they’d be running the whole West, and we’d all be working for them instead of the other way around.”

  Sam took a hammer and, laying the now white bar on the anvil, began the shaping that would make a heavy chain.

  “See you later.” Hjelmer tapped his shoulder and raised one hand in a salute.

  Sam nodded and kept on with his labors.

  Having just returned the night before from his meeting, Anner Valders nevertheless had the account books spread on the table in front of him and ready for Hjelmer’s inspection. With one sleeve tucked in where his arm—lost in a threshing accident several years earlier—had been, he flipped pages and wrote in entries with the other hand as if he’d been one-handed all his life.

  “Harvest is down, no thanks to the dry summer and that thunderstorm, and the shipping charges are up. Won’t be as much capital to work with as in the past.” Anner never had been one to look on the bright side.

  “I know. Anyone having trouble keeping up with their loan payments?” Shifting gears from blacksmith to banker had never been a problem for Hjelmer.

  “Not so far, but I hear talk that could be coming. If so, this would be the first fall we have defaults.” He ran his finger down the page and pointed out a couple of names. “Here and here, maybe.”

  Hjelmer nodded.

  “Your mother paid her entire loan back already.”

  “She did?”

  “Talking about building on.”

  Hjelmer nodded. “Not surprised. There most likely will be some new regulations coming through after the constitution is ratified. I’ll keep you up-to-date.”

  “If they let us alone, we could do business better.”

  “I know.” Hjelmer looked around the room off the back of the store, noting the heavy safe, the ledgers lined up on the shelves alongside the books they’d accumulated on banking. Since both of them learned banking because the community decided to organize a bank, thanks to the women, they had collected as much as they could to help them do it right. So far, the First Bank of Blessing was a profitable concern, with all the investors having a say in who received loans and where the money was invested.

  “You heard anything about the possibility of building one of those grain elevators here?” Anner closed the book they’d been looking at and put it back on the shelf.

  “Ah, that rumor’s been going on for years.”

  Anner shook his balding head. “No, but I heard from Henry over at the boardinghouse that a company is seriously thinking of building one here.”

  Hjelmer narrowed his eyes and, nodding slightly, worried his bottom lip. “Not if we build one first. They aren’t going to control us here in Blessing like they do in other places. I better check with the Farmers’ Alliance board, see if they’ve heard anything. Is the amount of grain going through here getting to be too much for the sack house?”

  “I don’t hear Olaf complaining. ’Sides, there was more last year, and he did all right.” Olaf Wold managed the sack house, where farmers brought their sacked grain to be weighed and stored until it could be shipped. They had never had a graft problem like in so many other areas of the state.

  All this to be done, and I have to go looking for Augusta. Hjelmer kept his face blank. No sense letting the whole world know his family business.

  “So you going to look for your sister?”

  Hjelmer stifled a groan. Of course the women had been discussing things again. How they got any quilting done when they spent so much time solving the world’s problems, or at least the problems around Blessing, he never knew.

  “Ja, not because I want to, though.” He studied the noncommittal look on the face of his friend and employee. “All right, I can tell you have something you want to say, so just say it.”

  “I’m not one to intrude.”

  “I know, I
know, but the women . . .”

  A twitch of the corner of Anner’s narrow lips said the comment made them totally in agreement.

  “It’ll be worse’n finding a needle in a haystack.” Anner shook his head, giving Hjelmer a pitying look. “Glad it’s you, not me.”

  “Thank you so very much. You come up with any ideas on how I should accomplish this, don’t stand on ceremony—tell me.”

  “Ja, I will. You thought about putting an ad in the papers?”

  “No. She can’t read English.”

  “No, but if someone is helping her, they could.”

  “True.” Hjelmer fingered his chin. “Anything else?”

  “When you are asking, you might mention the color of her eyes. Not too many people got the Bjorklund eyes. If your sister is like the men in your family, her eyes will stand out.”

  “Good point.” Hjelmer thought again. “And she is tall—for a woman, that is.” He knew that her bossiness wouldn’t be something that others would notice, but that’s what he remembered most about her. But then he hadn’t seen her for over five years. “Thanks, if you think of anything else, let me know. If she doesn’t arrive, or we don’t hear from her today, I’ll be leaving on the early train tomorrow.”

  Hjelmer greeted several people shopping and visiting while waiting their turn for Penny in the store and made his way upstairs to their bedroom to change into work clothes. If only he had a picture of Augusta, that would be a big help. But he’d asked and Mor said no. And she had no idea what Augusta might have been wearing. She was given clothes often by the people she worked for and so was able to dress more fashionably than many others.

  Setting wheel rims was preferable to setting legislators straight any day. Though his shoulders ached by suppertime and the burn on one hand reminded him that he needed to be more careful, when he sat down at the table, he knew he had accomplished something that would stay fixed for a while at least.